Quotes of the day

posted at 10:36 pm on May 31, 2009 by Allahpundit

“General Motors Corp. will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy early Monday, marking the humbling of an American icon that once dominated the global car industry and setting up a high-stakes gamble for U.S. taxpayers.

The question now facing 56,000 auto workers, 3,600 GM dealers and the Obama administration: Will it work?”

***
“After the grown-ups had gone to bed, Tommy and I shifted the Buick into neutral, pushed it down the driveway and out of earshot, started the engine and toured the neighborhood. The sheer difficulty of horsemanship can be illustrated by what happened to Tommy and me next. Nothing. We maneuvered the car home, turned it off and rolled it back up the driveway. (We were raised in the blessedly flat Midwest.) During our foray the Buick’s speedometer reached 30. But 30 miles per hour is a full gallop on a horse. Delete what you’ve seen of horse riding in movies. Possibly a kid who’d never been on a horse could ride at a gallop without killing himself. Possibly one of the Jonas Brothers could land an F-14 on a carrier deck.

Thus cars usurped the place of horses in our hearts. Once we’d caught a glimpse of a well-turned Goodyear, checked out the curves of the bodywork and gaped at that swell pair of headlights, well, the old gray mare was not what she used to be. We embarked upon life in the fast lane with our new paramour. It was a great love story of man and machine.”

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Bad management making bad decisions, allowing unions to create unsustainable economic requirements for workers and, ultimately, building cars (for decades) that were inferior to their Japanese and German counterparts.

Tomorrow when the headlines promote GM’s bankruptcy not a single reasonable adult should be surprised.

Of course not. It’s not supposed to work. The auto industry is the perfect vehicle for this junta to funnel our nation’s wealth (whatever’s left of it) to their union and enviro-wacko constituencies.

I thought that this was a well-known fact, clearly evident when the first $25 billion (outside of the bailouts) was authorized by Congress to help the big 3 retool in order to meet the idiotic environmental regulations that were slapped on them. For the hard-of-thinking, the junta made it clear by raising the CAFE standards just as bankruptcy was becoming a certainty. They didn’t even try to hide their idiotic, anti-American agenda. Transparency.

I have a very selfish question. Couldn’t they have done this sooner and not cost the taxpayers billions of dollars for the same results? Everyone should demand that their states adopt a Right to Work law, at least give the unions a chance to stand or fall on their own merits.

Guys. If you are a true capitalist then you must agree that unions (which I have no use for) are a part of the capitalists system. They aren’t some sort of entity outside of capitalism.

In short, unions flourish where bad management runs a company. As a rule, unions do not exist at companies where management creates an environment where unions can’t compete with the benefits that the company offers. (There are exceptions of course).

Guys. If you are a true capitalist then you must agree that unions (which I have no use for) are a part of the capitalists system. They aren’t some sort of entity outside of capitalism.

In short, unions flourish where bad management runs a company. As a rule, unions do not exist at companies where management creates an environment where unions can’t compete with the benefits that the company offers. (There are exceptions of course).

watson007 on May 31, 2009 at 10:48 PM

This is incorrect. It’s a collectivist entity working within a capitalist system. Capitalism is individualist, not collectivist.

When the big trusts became corrupt, the Left introduced the Anti-Trust bill, initiating the progressive era. Now that the unions have become veritable vampires on whole industries altogether, why isn’t there any movement to come up with an Anti-Union Bill? Why aren’t we union-busting just as the progressives did trust-busting years ago? Unions are devouring broad sections of economy, so there should be a broad movement against unions. GOP should become not just an anti-tax movement but an anti-union movement as well.

elgeneralisimo is reminded of an earlier “largest bankruptcy in American history” and successful government intervention…

Penn Central… Killed off by not so great management, government over regulation and a strangulating union. But the FedGov came to the rescue in that case as well, giving us Conrail and Amtrak… oh wait… bad example…

Stay tuned for a three cylinder Cadillac resembling the Trabant with features like having to shake the whole care to mix the fuel (or solar that doesn’t work in the dark) and names and designs that celebrate diversity. The corporation will be run by a transexual former hip-hop artist and Chicago politician.

Eh, you think you’ll actually be given a chance to buy a foreign car? Sorry, but after Ogabe destroys Ford, he and his minions will find a way to make foreign cars so outrageously expensive that only rich liberals will be able to afford them.

Keep your old car? That would be great for me, I would make a killing maintaining them, but those too will be outlawed for reasons of protecting the environment.

In Virginia in the mid seventies several grocery stores went union. The folded like a cheap suit within a year. I know that historically unions have served an import part for labor but they have become a business unto themselves. And they appear to be the only ones profiting. Not the workers, the union.

That’s what I meant. I have no problem with 50 workers binding together as a bargaining unit, but the unions being able to say that no one can work at a “union shop” unless they are union members is so anti-American and anti-capitalist that it boggles the mind. Personally, I don’t know how it ever passed muster in any court. And then unions bind across companies, while companies are not allowed to bind together (as that is collusion). It’s just insane.

On the back page of this quarter’s 0-60 Magazine is a solemn picture. A Pontiac GXP, probably the best car Pontiac has built in decades, in the throws of an exultant smokey burn out, captioned simply; one last caress.

I tried to be a good American and my first three cars were American, one from each of the majors. Within two years of buying each, they required so many repairs, it cost me less to give them to the dealers for parts. Toyota ever since.

Didn’t the employer becoming the deliverer of health care benefits (as an incentive to attract workers during WWII) cause the problem rather than the unions? The Unions only played what management created.

Imagine the flexibility and competitiveness that would be added to Americas business concerns if health care was not their responsibility?

My favorite anecdote about my POS Chevy was in about February:
Picture this: February in Montana. My Chevy Impala not starting. The security light coming on for no good reason, then the car not starting. The tow company coming out, jump starting the car (in spite of the fact that the battery read as “fine” on their system), and the car being fine for a few weeks. Then it would start all over again.
When I talked to Chevy about it, their first response was “well, it’s an intermittent problem so I shouldn’t worry about it.” Then their second response was to insinuate that because I have a vagina, I’m incapable of turning a car on. My response to that was to call them a-holes and ask them if they consider all their cars not starting an “intermittent problem”.

And that is when I started looking at Toyotas and Hondas. Finally buying a Camry.

You can cancel GMs debt, but you can’t make people buy the cars. It is not the debt that is the problem. The problem is now, and always has been, that not enough people want to buy their cars. Canceling the debt does not address that.